AMP, Accelerated Mobile Pages, accomplishes just what you would imagine upon hearing the acronym spelled out. It is used to increase the speed at which mobile browser pages load. AMP is Google’s response to the pre-rendered, quickly loading Facebook articles that can be accessed immediately by all users. It is also an attempt to combat Adblockers. As most of the Western world knows mobile loading times when searching online are not ideal. The process is cluttered, unreliable and worst of all slow.
AMP’s fast loading of publisher content on a mobile device is accomplished by:
- Pre-rendering the content while limiting the use of JavaScript
- Hiding content so Google doesn’t have to fetch page content from the publisher’s server
The average loading time for a website without AMP is 22 seconds, this is an inconceivable amount of time for anyone to imagine waiting for their phone to accomplish loading a webpage. It may seem outrageous to read but the reality of the mobile, portable world is that we will no longer patiently wait for a webpage to load for upwards of five seconds let alone twenty. In fact it has been determined that a webpage will lose its user if the page takes longer than 300 milliseconds to visibly begin loading. This rings bad news for those people without AMP in their mobile site. Instead of waiting for the page to load the mobile user has already moved onto another page, potentially a competing business’s.
AMP is an industry’s open-source approach to make mobile Internet faster and more reliable. Google along with dozens of other technology, lifestyle and economic companies have partnered in creating a tool that reduces the loading time of a webpage to 0.7 seconds from 22 seconds. This is important for those building a presence online because the faster the information is being loaded for the mobile user the faster they can see advertisements and online content – thereby satisfying the very purpose of the content, engaging a user in the product or service.
AMP has no creative control over content, there is no gatekeeping tool embedded in this software. It is created by the industry, for the industry. AMP is an ever-evolving ever-changing tool that is continually being perfected and updated in order to satisfy the most people in the least amount of time. Advancements in the mobile world show no signs of slowing down, and mobile sites without AMP will be playing an impossible game of catch-up they’ll never win.
